Are dinosaur fossils a national resource for research and education, or do they belong to those who own the land they are found on -or who buy them from the owners? Part of the problem is the desirability of dinosaur fossils, which fuels a black market in stolen or smuggled fossils. There are those who believe that fossils should be treated as sacred relics, for scientific reasons: after all, the connection between a fossil and the place its found in is an important scientific tool. Others, like commercial paleontologist Japheth Boyce, say it doesn’t matter because there are plenty of fossils, and there will always be more found.

To illustrate the overabundance of fossils in our midst, Boyce points to the bounty of Hadrosaur and Triceratops dinosaur fossils that remain unexcavated at just two sites in the western United States. “Duck-billed dinosaurs,” Boyce says of one type of Hadrosaur, “were basically the deer or buffalo of the Late Cretaceous—they were prey animals for just about everything. There’s a mass-mortality site at a privately owned quarry near Faith, South Dakota, about 100 miles north of Rapid City. The duck-bills there were probably migrating and got caught in a flooding river or plains-delta area. There are perhaps 3,000 Hadrosaurs in that one quarry. In central Montana, along the Missouri River, there’s a quarry of Triceratops, the dinosaur with three horns on its face. That one Triceratops quarry contains about 300 specimens. There aren’t 300 museums in the world that want a Triceratops.”

On the other side of the argument is Kenshu Shimada, a professor of paleobiology at DePaul University in Chicago, and the co-author of a recent screed describing fossils as “nonrenewable natural resources” that should be “conserved in perpetuity.” For Shimada and his co-authors, “the battle against heightened commercialization of fossils” is “the greatest challenge to paleontology of the 21st century.”

“It’s a very unfortunate situation,” Shimada elaborates when I ask him over the phone about all those unwanted fossilized Triceratops skeletons. “The reason why there are so few museums that can take the specimens,” he says, “is because the job market for paleontologists is shrinking, as is the funding to collect and house fossils in museums. It’s not that they don’t want to take them—they don’t have the resources.”

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Well, you see, it's not that museums are reluctant to purchase these fossils. There are many, many, many museums throughout the U.S. alone that would love to have a Triceratops on display! The problem is those museums do not have the funding or the man power to purchase these fossils. In part because they are not being financially backed by the same private buyers you think should adorn their living rooms with a mounted T. rex.

How about this? These wealthy benefactors do more to support museums around the country, and in turn they get to see more dinosaur fossils. Oh, and just for the heck of it, let's let thousands of children whose families can't have a dinosaur in their living room see those fossils as well.

There are private buyers who would love to have these fossils in their own private collections. What's wrong with that? Since museums seem reluctant to purchase these fossils for their buildings, then I believe private buyers would care for these fossils as much as - perhaps, better than - museums. What's wrong with that?